"I adopt," says Our Missis, "the brand set upon such a person by the

righteous indignation of my friend Miss Piff. A malignant maniac. Know,

then, that that malignant maniac has sprung from the congenial soil of

France, and that his malignant madness was in unchecked action on this

same part of my journey."

I noticed that Sniff was rubbing his hands, and that Mrs. Sniff had got

her eye upon him. But I did not take more particular notice, owing to

the excited state in which the young ladies was, and to feeling myself

called upon to keep it up with a howl.

"On my experience south of Paris," said Our Missis, in a deep tone, "I

will not expatiate. Too loathsome were the task! But fancy this. Fancy a

guard coming round, with the train at full speed, to inquire how many

for dinner. Fancy his telegraphing forward the number of diners. Fancy

every one expected, and the table elegantly laid for the complete party.

Fancy a charming dinner, in a charming room, and the head cook,

concerned for the honor of every dish, superintending in his clean white

jacket and cap. Fancy the Beast traveling six hundred miles on end, very

fast, and with great punctuality, yet being taught to expect all this to

be done for it!"

A spirited chorus of "The Beast!"

I noticed that Sniff was agin a-rubbing his stomach with a soothing

hand, and that he had drored up one leg. But agin I didn't take

particular notice, looking on myself as called upon to stimilate public

feeling. It being a lark besides.

"Putting everything together," said Our Missis, "French Refreshmenting

comes to this, and oh, it comes to a nice total! First: eatable things

to eat, and drinkable things to drink."

A groan from the young ladies, kep' up by me.

"Second: convenience, and even elegance."

Another groan from the young ladies, kep' up by me.

"Third: moderate charges."

This time a groan from me, kep' up by the young ladies.

"Fourth:--and here," says Our Missis, "I claim your angriest

sympathy,--attention, common civility, nay, even politeness!"

Me and the young ladies regularly raging mad all together.

"And I cannot in conclusion," says Our Missis with her spitefullest

sneer, "give you a completer pictur of that despicable nation (after

what I have related), than assuring you that they wouldn't bear our

constitutional ways and noble independence at Mugby Junction for a

single month, and that they would turn us to the right-about and put

another system in our places as soon as look at us; perhaps sooner, for

I do not believe they have the good taste to care to look at us twice."

The swelling tumult was arrested in its rise. Sniff, bore away by his

servile disposition, had drored up his leg with a higher and a higher

relish, and was now discovered to be waving his corkscrew over his

head. It was at this moment that Mrs. Sniff, who had kep' her eye upon

him like the fabled obelisk, descended on her victim. Our Missis

followed them both out, and cries was heard in the sawdust department.

You come into the Down Refreshment Room at the Junction, making believe

you don't know me, and I'll pint you out with my right thumb over my

shoulder which is Our Missis, and which is Miss Whiff, and which is Miss

Piff, and which is Mrs. Sniff. But you won't get a chance to see Sniff,

because he disappeared that night. Whether he perished, tore to pieces,

I cannot say; but his corkscrew alone remains to bear witness to the

servility of his disposition.

THE BURNING OF NEWGATE

From 'Barnaby Rudge'

During the whole of this day, every regiment in or near the metropolis

was on duty in one or other part of the town; and the regulars and

militia, in obedience to the orders which were sent to every barrack and

station within twenty-four hours' journey, began to pour in by all the

roads. But the disturbances had attained to such a formidable height,

and the rioters had grown with impunity to be so audacious, that the

sight of this great force, continually augmented by new arrivals,

instead of operating as a check, stimulated them to outrages of greater

hardihood than any they had yet committed; and helped to kindle a flame

in London the like of which had never been beheld, even in its ancient

and rebellious times.

All yesterday, and on this day likewise, the commander-in-chief

endeavored to arouse the magistrates to a sense of their duty, and in

particular the Lord Mayor, who was the faintest-hearted and most timid

of them all. With this object, large bodies of the soldiery were several

times dispatched to the Mansion House to await his orders: but as he

could by no threats or persuasions be induced to give any, and as the

men remained in the open street,--fruitlessly for any good purpose, and

thrivingly for a very bad one,--these laudable attempts did harm rather

than good. For the crowd, becoming speedily acquainted with the Lord

Mayor's temper, did not fail to take advantage of it by boasting that

even the civil authorities were opposed to the Papists, and could not

find it in their hearts to molest those who were guilty of no other

offense. These vaunts they took care to make within the hearing of the

soldiers: and they, being naturally loath to quarrel with the people,

received their advances kindly enough; answering, when they were asked

if they desired to fire upon their countrymen, "No, they would be damned

if they did;" and showing much honest simplicity and good-nature. The

feeling that the military were No Popery men, and were ripe for

disobeying orders and joining the mob, soon became very prevalent in

consequence. Rumors of their disaffection, and of their leaning towards

the popular cause, spread from mouth to mouth with astonishing rapidity;

and whenever they were drawn up idly in the streets or squares there was

sure to be a crowd about them, cheering, and shaking hands, and treating

them with a great show of confidence and affection.

By this time the crowd was everywhere; all concealment and disguise were

laid aside, and they pervaded the whole town. If any man among them

wanted money, he had but to knock at the door of a dwelling-house, or

walk into a shop, and demand it in the rioters' name, and his demand was

instantly complied with. The peaceable citizens being afraid to lay

hands upon them singly and alone, it may be easily supposed that when

gathered together in bodies they were perfectly secure from

interruption. They assembled in the streets, traversed them at their

will and pleasure, and publicly concerted their plans. Business was

quite suspended; the greater part of the shops were closed; most of the

houses displayed a blue flag in token of their adherence to the popular

side; and even the Jews in Houndsditch, Whitechapel, and those quarters,

wrote upon their doors or window-shutters, "This House is a True

Protestant." The crowd was the law, and never was the law held in

greater dread or more implicitly obeyed.

It was about six o'clock in the evening when a vast mob poured into

Lincoln's Inn Fields by every avenue, and divided--evidently in

pursuance of a previous design--into several parties. It must not be

understood that this arrangement was known to the whole crowd, but that

it was the work of a few leaders who, mingling with the men as they came

upon the ground, and calling to them to fall into this or that party,

effected it as rapidly as if it had been determined on by a council of

the whole number, and every man had known his place.

It was perfectly notorious to the assemblage that the largest body,

which comprehended about two-thirds of the whole, was designed for the

attack on Newgate. It comprehended all the rioters who had been

conspicuous in any of their former proceedings; all those whom they

recommended as daring hands and fit for the work; all those whose

companions had been taken in the riots; and a great number of people who

were relatives or friends of felons in the jail. This last class

included not only the most desperate and utterly abandoned villains in

London, but some who were comparatively innocent. There was more than

one woman there, disguised in man's attire, and bent upon the rescue of

a child or brother. There were the two sons of a man who lay under

sentence of death, and who was to be executed along with three others,

on the next day but one. There was a great party of boys whose fellow

pickpockets were in the prison; and at the skirts of all, a score of

miserable women, outcasts from the world, seeking to release some other

fallen creature as miserable as themselves, or moved by a general

sympathy perhaps--God knows--with all who were without hope and

wretched.

Old swords, and pistols without ball or powder; sledge-hammers, knives,

axes, saws, and weapons pillaged from the butchers' shops; a forest of

iron bars and wooden clubs; long ladders for scaling the walls, each

carried on the shoulders of a dozen men; lighted torches; tow smeared

with pitch, and tar, and brimstone; staves roughly plucked from fence

and paling; and even crutches taken from crippled beggars in the

streets, composed their arms. When all was ready, Hugh and Dennis, with

Simon Tappertit between them, led the way. Roaring and chafing like an

angry sea, the crowd pressed after them.

Instead of going straight down Holborn to the jail, as all expected,

their leaders took the way to Clerkenwell, and pouring down a quiet

street, halted before a locksmith's house--the Golden Key....

The locksmith was taken to the head of the crowd, and required to walk

between his two conductors; the whole body was put in rapid motion; and

without any shouting or noise they bore down straight on Newgate and

halted in a dense mass before the prison gate.

Breaking the silence they had hitherto preserved, they raised a great

cry as soon as they were ranged before the jail, and demanded to speak

with the governor. Their visit was not wholly unexpected, for his house,

which fronted the street, was strongly barricaded, the wicket-gate of

the prison was closed up, and at no loophole or grating was any person

to be seen. Before they had repeated their summons many times, a man

appeared upon the roof of the governor's house, and asked what it was

they wanted.

Some said one thing, some another, and some only groaned and hissed. It

being now nearly dark, and the house high, many persons in the throng

were not aware that any one had come to answer them, and continued their

clamor until the intelligence was gradually diffused through the whole

concourse. Ten minutes or more elapsed before any one voice could be

heard with tolerable distinctness; during which interval the figure

remained perched alone, against the summer evening sky, looking down

into the troubled street.

"Are you," said Hugh at length, "Mr. Akerman, the head jailer here?"

"Of course he is, brother," whispered Dennis. But Hugh, without minding

him, took his answer from the man himself.

"Yes," he said; "I am."

"You have got some friends of ours in your custody, master."

"I have a good many people in my custody." He glanced downward as he

spoke, into the jail; and the feeling that he could see into the

different yards, and that he overlooked everything which was hidden from

their view by the rugged walls, so lashed and goaded the mob that they

howled like wolves.

"Deliver up our friends," said Hugh, "and you may keep the rest."

"It's my duty to keep them all. I shall do my duty."

"If you don't throw the doors open, we shall break 'em down," said Hugh;

"for we will have the rioters out."

"All I can do, good people," Akerman replied, "is to exhort you to

disperse; and to remind you that the consequences of any disturbance in

this place will be very severe, and bitterly repented by most of you,

when it is too late."

He made as though he would retire when he had said these words, but he

was checked by the voice of the locksmith.

"Mr. Akerman!" cried Gabriel, "Mr. Akerman!"

"I will hear no more from any of you," replied the governor, turning

towards the speaker, and waving his hand.

"But I am not one of them," said Gabriel. "I am an honest man, Mr.

Akerman; a respectable tradesman--Gabriel Varden, the locksmith. You

know me?"

"You among the crowd!" cried the governor in an altered voice.

"Brought here by force--brought here to pick the lock of the great door

for them," rejoined the locksmith. "Bear witness for me, Mr. Akerman,

that I refuse to do it; and that I will not do it, come what may of my

refusal. If any violence is done to me, please to remember this."

"Is there no way of helping you?" said the governor.

"None, Mr. Akerman. You'll do your duty, and I'll do mine. Once again,

you robbers and cut-throats," said the locksmith, turning round upon

them, "I refuse. Ah! Howl till you're hoarse. I refuse."

"Stay--stay!" said the jailer, hastily. "Mr. Varden, I know you for a

worthy man, and one who would do no unlawful act except upon

compulsion--"

"Upon compulsion, sir," interposed the locksmith, who felt that the tone

in which this was said conveyed the speaker's impression that he had

ample excuse for yielding to the furious multitude who beset and hemmed

him in on every side, and among whom he stood, an old man, quite

alone,--"upon compulsion, sir, I'll do nothing."

"Where is that man," said the keeper, anxiously, "who spoke to me just

now?"

"Here!" Hugh replied.

"Do you know what the guilt of murder is, and that by keeping that

honest tradesman at your side you endanger his life!"

"We know it very well," he answered; "for what else did we bring him

here? Let's have our friends, master, and you shall have your friend. Is

that fair, lads?"

The mob replied to him with a loud hurrah!

"You see how it is, sir," cried Varden. "Keep 'em out, in King George's

name. Remember what I have said. Good-night!"

There was no more parley. A shower of stones and other missiles

compelled the keeper of the jail to retire; and the mob, pressing on,

and swarming round the walls, forced Gabriel Varden close up to the

door.

In vain the basket of tools was laid upon the ground before him, and he

was urged in turn by promises, by blows, by offers of reward and threats

of instant death, to do the office for which they had brought him there.

"No," cried the sturdy locksmith, "I will not."

He had never loved his life so well as then, but nothing could move him.

The savage faces that glared upon him, look where he would; the cries of

those who thirsted like wild animals for his blood; the sight of men

pressing forward, and trampling down their fellows, as they strove to

reach him, and struck at him above the heads of other men, with axes and

with iron bars; all failed to daunt him. He looked from man to man and

face to face, and still, with quickened breath and lessening color,

cried firmly, "I will not!"

Dennis dealt him a blow upon the face which felled him to the ground. He

sprang up again like a man in the prime of life, and with blood upon his

forehead caught him by the throat.

"You cowardly dog!" he said: "Give me my daughter! Give me my daughter!"

They struggled together. Some cried "Kill him!" and some (but they were

not near enough) strove to trample him to death. Tug as he would at the

old man's wrists, the hangman could not force him to unclinch his hands.

"Is this all the return you make me, you ungrateful monster?" he

articulated with great difficulty, and with many oaths.

"Give me my daughter!" cried the locksmith, who was now as fierce as

those who gathered round him; "give me my daughter!"

He was down again, and up, and down once more, and buffeting with a

score of them, who bandied him from hand to hand, when one tall fellow,

fresh from a slaughter-house, whose dress and great thigh-boots smoked

hot with grease and blood, raised a pole-axe, and swearing a horrible

oath, aimed it at the old man's uncovered head. At that instant, and in

the very act, he fell himself, as if struck by lightning, and over his

body a one-armed man came darting to the locksmith's side. Another man

was with him, and both caught the locksmith roughly in their grasp.

"Leave him to us!" they cried to Hugh--struggling as they spoke, to

force a passage backward through the crowd. "Leave him to us. Why do you

waste your whole strength on such as he, when a couple of men can finish

him in as many minutes! You lose time. Remember the prisoners! remember

Barnaby!"

The cry ran through the mob. Hammers began to rattle on the walls; and

every man strove to reach the prison, and be among the foremost rank.

Fighting their way through the press and struggle, as desperately as if

they were in the midst of enemies rather than their own friends, the two

men retreated with the locksmith between them, and dragged him through

the very heart of the concourse.

And now the strokes began to fall like hail upon the gate and on the

strong building; for those who could not reach the door spent their

fierce rage on anything--even on the great blocks of stone, which

shivered their weapons into fragments, and made their hands and arms to

tingle as if the walls were active in their stout resistance, and dealt

them back their blows. The clash of iron ringing upon iron mingled with

the deafening tumult and sounded high above it, as the great

sledge-hammers rattled on the nailed and plated door: the sparks flew

off in showers; men worked in gangs, and at short intervals relieved

each other, that all their strength might be devoted to the work; but

there stood the portal still, as grim and dark and strong as ever, and

saving for the dints upon its battered surface, quite unchanged.

While some brought all their energies to bear upon this toilsome task,

and some, rearing ladders against the prison, tried to clamber to the

summit of the walls they were too short to scale, and some again engaged

a body of police a hundred strong, and beat them back and trod them

under foot by force of numbers, others besieged the house on which the

jailer had appeared, and driving in the door, brought out his furniture

and piled it up against the prison gate to make a bonfire which should

burn it down. As soon as this device was understood, all those who had

labored hitherto cast down their tools and helped to swell the heap,

which reached half-way across the street, and was so high that those who

threw more fuel on the top got up by ladders. When all the keeper's

goods were flung upon this costly pile, to the last fragment, they

smeared it with the pitch and tar and rosin they had brought, and

sprinkled it with turpentine. To all the woodwork round the prison

doors they did the like, leaving not a joist or beam untouched. This

infernal christening performed, they fired the pile with lighted matches

and with blazing tow, and then stood by, awaiting the result.

The furniture being very dry and rendered more combustible by wax and

oil, besides the arts they had used, took fire at once. The flames

roared high and fiercely, blackening the prison wall, and twining up its

lofty front like burning serpents. At first they crowded round the

blaze, and vented their exultation only in their looks; but when it grew

hotter and fiercer--when it crackled, leaped, and roared, like a great

furnace--when it shone upon the opposite houses and lighted up not only

the pale and wondering faces at the windows, but the inmost corners of

each habitation--when, through the deep red heat and glow, the fire was

seen sporting and toying with the door, now clinging to its obdurate

surface, now gliding off with fierce inconstancy and soaring high into

the sky, anon returning to fold it in its burning grasp and lure it to

its ruin--when it shone and gleamed so brightly that the church clock of

St. Sepulchre's, so often pointing to the hour of death, was legible as

in broad day, and the vane upon its steeple-top glittered in the

unwonted light like something richly jeweled--when blackened stone and

sombre brick grew ruddy in the deep reflection, and windows shone like

burnished gold, dotting the longest distance in the fiery vista with

their specks of brightness--when wall and tower and roof and

chimney-stack seemed drunk, and in the flickering glare appeared to reel

and stagger--when scores of objects, never seen before, burst out upon

the view, and things the most familiar put on some new aspect--then the

mob began to join the whirl, and with loud yells, and shouts, and

clamor, such as happily is seldom heard, bestirred themselves to feed

the fire and keep it at its height.

Although the heat was so intense that the paint on the houses over

against the prison parched and crackled up, and swelling into boils as

it were, from excess of torture, broke and crumbled away; although the

glass fell from the window-sashes, and the lead and iron on the roofs

blistered the incautious hand that touched them, and the sparrows in the

eaves took wing, and rendered giddy by the smoke, fell fluttering down

upon the blazing pile;--still the fire was tended unceasingly by busy

hands, and round it men were going always. They never slackened in

their zeal, or kept aloof, but pressed upon the flames so hard that

those in front had much ado to save themselves from being thrust in; if

one man swooned or dropped, a dozen struggled for his place, and that,

although they knew the pain and thirst and pressure to be unendurable.

Those who fell down in fainting fits, and were not crushed or burned,

were carried to an inn-yard close at hand, and dashed with water from a

pump; of which buckets full were passed from man to man among the crowd;

but such was the strong desire of all to drink, and such the fighting to

be first, that for the most part the whole contents were spilled upon

the ground, without the lips of one man being moistened.

Meanwhile, and in the midst of all the roar and outcry, those who were

nearest to the pile heaped up again the burning fragments that came

toppling down, and raked the fire about the door, which, although a

sheet of flame, was still a door fast locked and barred, and kept them

out. Great pieces of blazing wood were passed, besides, above the

people's heads to such as stood about the ladders, and some of these,

climbing up to the topmost stave, and holding on with one hand by the

prison wall, exerted all their skill and force to cast these fire-brands

on the roof, or down into the yards within. In many instances their

efforts were successful, which occasioned a new and appalling addition

to the horrors of the scene; for the prisoners within, seeing from

between their bars that the fire caught in many places and thrived

fiercely, and being all locked up in strong cells for the night, began

to know that they were in danger of being burned alive. This terrible

fear, spreading from cell to cell and from yard to yard, vented itself

in such dismal cries and wailings, and in such dreadful shrieks for

help, that the whole jail resounded with the noise; which was loudly

heard even above the shouting of the mob and roaring of the flames, and

was so full of agony and despair that it made the boldest tremble....

The women who were looking on shrieked loudly, beat their hands

together, stopped their ears, and many fainted; the men who were not

near the walls and active in the siege, rather than do nothing tore up

the pavement of the street, and did so with a haste and fury they could

not have surpassed if that had been the jail, and they were near their

object. Not one living creature in the throng was for an instant still.

The whole great mass were mad.

A shout! Another! Another yet, though few knew why, or what it meant.

But those around the gate had seen it slowly yield, and drop from its

topmost hinge. It hung on that side by but one, but it was upright still

because of the bar, and its having sunk of its own weight into the heap

of ashes at its foot. There was now a gap at the top of the doorway,

through which could be descried a gloomy passage, cavernous and dark.

Pile up the fire!

It burned fiercely. The door was red-hot, and the gap wider. They vainly

tried to shield their faces with their hands, and standing as if in

readiness for a spring, watched the place. Dark figures, some crawling

on their hands and knees, some carried in the arms of others, were seen

to pass along the roof. It was plain the jail could hold out no longer.

The keeper and his officers, and their wives and children, were

escaping. Pile up the fire!

The door sank down again: it settled deeper in the

cinders--tottered--yielded--was down!

As they shouted again, they fell back for a moment, and left a clear

space about the fire that lay between them and the jail entry. Hugh

leaped upon the blazing heap, and scattering a train of sparks into the

air, and making the dark lobby glitter with those that hung upon his

dress, dashed into the jail.

The hangman followed. And then so many rushed upon their track that the

fire got trodden down and thinly strewn about the street; but there was

no need of it now, for inside and out, the prison was in flames.

* * * * *

During the whole course of the terrible scene which was now at its

height, one man in the jail suffered a degree of fear and mental torment

which had no parallel in the endurance even of those who lay under

sentence of death.

When the rioters first assembled before the building, the murderer was

roused from sleep--if such slumbers as his may have that blessed

name--by the roar of voices, and the struggling of a great crowd. He

started up as these sounds met his ear, and sitting on his bedstead,

listened.

After a short interval of silence the noise burst out again. Still

listening attentively, he made out in course of time that the jail was

besieged by a furious multitude. His guilty conscience instantly arrayed

these men against himself, and brought the fear upon him that he would

be singled out and torn to pieces.

Once impressed with the terror of this conceit, everything tended to

confirm and strengthen it. His double crime, the circumstances under

which it had been committed, the length of time that had elapsed, and

its discovery in spite of all, made him as it were the visible object of

the Almighty's wrath. In all the crime and vice and moral gloom of the

great pest-house of the capital, he stood alone, marked and singled out

by his great guilt, a Lucifer among the devils. The other prisoners were

a host, hiding and sheltering each other--a crowd like that without the

walls. He was one man against the whole united concourse; a single,

solitary, lonely man, from whom the very captives in the jail fell off

and shrunk appalled.

It might be that the intelligence of his capture having been bruited

abroad, they had come there purposely to drag him out and kill him in

the street; or it might be that they were the rioters, and in pursuance

of an old design had come to sack the prison. But in either case he had

no belief or hope that they would spare him. Every shout they raised and

every sound they made was a blow upon his heart. As the attack went on,

he grew more wild and frantic in his terror; tried to pull away the bars

that guarded the chimney and prevented him from climbing up; called

loudly on the turnkeys to cluster round the cell and save him from the

fury of the rabble, or put him in some dungeon underground, no matter of

what depth, how dark it was, or loathsome, or beset with rats and

creeping things, so that it hid him and was hard to find.

But no one came, or answered him. Fearful, even while he cried to them,

of attracting attention, he was silent. By-and-by he saw, as he looked

from his grated window, a strange glimmering on the stone walls and

pavement of the yard. It was feeble at first, and came and went, as

though some officers with torches were passing to and fro upon the roof

of the prison. Soon it reddened, and lighted brands came whirling down,

spattering the ground with fire, and burning sullenly in corners. One

rolled beneath a wooden bench and set it in a blaze; another caught a

water-spout, and so went climbing up the wall, leaving a long straight

track of fire behind it. After a time, a slow thick shower of burning

fragments, from some upper portion of the prison which was blazing nigh,

began to fall before his door. Remembering that it opened outwards, he

knew that every spark which fell upon the heap, and in the act lost its

bright life and died an ugly speck of dust and rubbish, helped to entomb

him in a living grave. Still, though the jail resounded with shrieks and

cries for help,--though the fire bounded up as if each separate name had

had a tiger's life, and roared as though in every one there were a

hungry voice--though the heat began to grow intense, and the air

suffocating, and the clamor without increased, and the danger of his

situation even from one merciless element was every moment more

extreme,--still he was afraid to raise his voice again, lest the crowd

should break in, and should, of their own ears or from the information

given them by the other prisoners, get the clew to his place of

confinement. Thus fearful alike of those within the prison and of those

without; of noise and silence; light and darkness; of being released,

and being left there to die: he was so tortured and tormented, that

nothing man has ever done to man in the horrible caprice of power and

cruelty, exceeds his self-inflicted punishment.

Now, now, the door was down. Now they came rushing through the jail,

calling to each other in the vaulted passages; clashing the iron gates

dividing yard from yard; beating at the doors of cells and wards;

wrenching off bolts and locks and bars; tearing down the doorposts to

get men out; endeavoring to drag them by main force through gaps and

windows where a child could scarcely pass; whooping and yelling without

a moment's rest; and running through the heat and flames as if they were

cased in metal. By their legs, their arms, the hair upon their heads,

they dragged the prisoners out. Some threw themselves upon the captives

as they got towards the door, and tried to file away their irons; some

danced about them with a frenzied joy, and rent their clothes, and were

ready, as it seemed, to tear them limb from limb. Now a party of a dozen

men came darting through the yard into which the murderer cast fearful

glances from his darkened window; dragging a prisoner along the ground,

whose dress they had nearly torn from his body in their mad eagerness to

set him free, and who was bleeding and senseless in their hands. Now a

score of prisoners ran to and fro, who had lost themselves in the

intricacies of the prison, and were so bewildered with the noise and

glare that they knew not where to turn or what to do, and still cried

out for help as loudly as before. Anon some famished wretch, whose

theft had been a loaf of bread or scrap of butcher's meat, came skulking

past, barefooted--going slowly away because that jail, his house, was

burning; not because he had any other, or had friends to meet, or old

haunts to revisit, or any liberty to gain but liberty to starve and die.

And then a knot of highwaymen went trooping by, conducted by the friends

they had among the crowd, who muffled their fetters as they went along

with handkerchiefs and bands of hay, and wrapped them in coats and

cloaks, and gave them drink from bottles, and held it to their lips,

because of their handcuffs which there was no time to remove. All this,

and Heaven knows how much more, was done amidst a noise, a hurry, and

distraction, like nothing that we know of even in our dreams; which

seemed forever on the rise, and never to decrease for the space of a

single instant.

He was still looking down from his window upon these things, when a band

of men with torches, ladders, axes, and many kinds of weapons, poured

into the yard, and hammering at his door, inquired if there were any

prisoner within. He left the window when he saw them coming, and drew

back into the remotest corner of the cell; but although he returned them

no answer, they had a fancy that some one was inside, for they presently

set ladders against it, and began to tear away the bars at the casement;

not only that, indeed, but with pickaxes to hew down the very stones in

the wall.

As soon as they had made a breach at the window, large enough for the

admission of a man's head, one of them thrust in a torch and looked all

round the room. He followed this man's gaze until it rested on himself,

and heard him demand why he had not answered, but made him no reply.

In the general surprise and wonder, they were used to this; without

saying anything more, they enlarged the breach until it was large enough

to admit the body of a man, and then came dropping down upon the floor,

one after another, until the cell was full. They caught him up among

them, handed him to the window, and those who stood upon the ladders

passed him down upon the pavement of the yard. Then the rest came out,

one after another, and bidding him fly and lose no time, or the way

would be choked up, hurried away to rescue others.

It seemed not a minute's work from first to last. He staggered to his

feet, incredulous of what had happened, when the yard was filled again,

and a crowd rushed on, hurrying Barnaby among them. In another

minute--not so much: another minute! the same instant, with no lapse or

interval between!--he and his son were being passed from hand to hand,

through the dense crowd in the street, and were glancing backward at a

burning pile which some one said was Newgate....

When he [the hangman] had issued his instructions relative to every

other part of the building, and the mob were dispersed from end to end,

and busy at their work, he took a bundle of keys from a kind of cupboard

in the wall, and going by a private passage near the chapel (it joined

the governor's house, and was then on fire), betook himself to the

condemned cells, which were a series of small, strong, dismal rooms,

opening on a low gallery, guarded at the end at which he entered by a

strong iron wicket, and at its opposite extremity by two doors and a

thick grate. Having double-locked the wicket and assured himself that

the other entrances were well secured, he sat down on a bench in the

gallery and sucked the head of his stick with an air of the utmost

complacency, tranquillity, and contentment.

It would have been strange enough, a man's enjoying himself in this

quiet manner while the prison was burning and such a tumult was cleaving

the air, though he had been outside the walls. But here in the very

heart of the building, and moreover, with the prayers and cries of the

four men under sentence sounding in his ears, and their hands, stretched

out through the gratings in their cell doors, clasped in frantic

entreaty before his very eyes, it was particularly remarkable. Indeed,

Mr. Dennis appeared to think it an uncommon circumstance, and to banter

himself upon it; for he thrust his hat on one side as some men do when

they are in a waggish humor, sucked the head of his stick with a higher

relish, and smiled as though he would say:--"Dennis, you're a rum dog;

you're a queer fellow; you're capital company, Dennis, and quite a

character!"

He sat in this way for some minutes, while the four men in the cells,

certain that somebody had entered the gallery but unable to see who,

gave vent to such piteous entreaties as wretches in their miserable

condition may be supposed to have been inspired with; urging whoever it

was to set them at liberty, for the love of Heaven; and protesting with

great fervor, and truly enough perhaps for the time, that if they

escaped they would amend their ways, and would never, never, never again

do wrong before God or man, but would lead penitent and sober lives,

and sorrowfully repent the crimes they had committed. The terrible

energy with which they spoke would have moved any person, no matter how

good or just (if any good or just person could have strayed into that

sad place that night), to set them at liberty, and while he would have

left any other punishment to its free course, to save them from this

last dreadful and repulsive penalty; which never turned a man inclined

to evil, and has hardened thousands who were half inclined to good.

Mr. Dennis, who had been bred and nurtured in the good old school, and

had administered the good old laws on the good old plan, always once and

sometimes twice every six weeks, for a long time bore these appeals with

a deal of philosophy. Being at last, however, rather disturbed in his

pleasant reflection by their repetition, he rapped at one of the doors

with his stick, and cried,--

"Hold your noise there, will you?"...

Mr. Dennis resumed in a sort of coaxing tone:--

"Now look'ee here, you four. I'm come here to take care of you, and see

that you ain't burnt, instead of the other thing. It's no use you making

any noise, for you won't be found out by them as has broken in, and

you'll only be hoarse when you come to the speeches,--which is a pity.

What I say in respect to the speeches always is, 'Give it mouth.' That's

my maxim. Give it mouth. I've heerd," said the hangman, pulling off his

hat to take his handkerchief from the crown and wipe his face, and then

putting it on again a little more on one side than before, "I've heerd a

eloquence on them boards,--you know what boards I mean,--and have heerd

a degree of mouth given to them speeches, that they was as clear as a

bell, and as good as a play. There's a pattern! And always, when a thing

of this natur's to come off, what I stand up for is a proper frame of

mind. Let's have a proper frame of mind, and we can go through with it,

creditable--pleasant--sociable. Whatever you do (and I address myself in

particular to you in the furthest), never snivel. I'd sooner by half,

though I lose by it, see a man tear his clothes a-purpose to spile 'em

before they come to me, than find him sniveling. It is ten to one a

better frame of mind, every way!"

MONSEIGNEUR

From 'A Tale of Two Cities'

Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his

fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in

his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to

the crowd of worshipers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur was

about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many

things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather

rapidly swallowing France; but his morning's chocolate could not so much

as get into the throat of Monseigneur without the aid of four strong men

besides the Cook.

Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the

Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his

pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to

conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips. One lackey carried

the chocolate pot into the sacred presence; a second milled and frothed

the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a

third presented the favored napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold

watches) poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to

dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high

place under the admiring heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his

escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three

men; he must have died of two.

Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where the Comedy

and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented. Monseigneur was out at

a little supper most nights, with fascinating company. So polite and so

impressible was Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far

more influence with him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and

state secrets than the needs of all France. A happy circumstance for

France, as the like always is for all countries similarly

favored!--always was for England (by way of example) in the regretted

days of the merry Stuart who sold it.

Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which

was to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public

business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all

go his way--tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general

and particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the

world was made for them. The text of his order (altered from the

original by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran, "The earth and the

fullness thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur."

Yet Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept into

his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both classes of

affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General. As to finances

public, because Monseigneur could not make anything at all of them, and

must consequently let them out to somebody who could; as to finances

private, because Farmers-General were rich, and Monseigneur, after

generations of great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence

Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent while there was yet time

to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could wear, and

had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General, poor in

family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane with a golden

apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the outer rooms,

much prostrated before by mankind--always excepting superior mankind of

the blood of Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down upon

him with the loftiest contempt.

A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his

stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women

waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder and

forage where he could, the Farmer-General--howsoever his matrimonial

relations conduced to social morality--was at least the greatest reality

among the personages who attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.

For the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned with

every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could

achieve, were in truth not a sound business; considered with any

reference to the scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere (and not

so far off, either, but that the watching towers of Notre-Dame, almost

equidistant from the two extremes, could see them both), they would have

been an exceedingly uncomfortable business--if that could have been

anybody's business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers

destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship;

civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of

the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser

lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly

in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order

of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from

which anything was to be got--these were to be told off by the score and

the score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the

State, yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with

lives passed in traveling by any straight road to any true earthly end,

were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty

remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their

courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had

discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the

State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to

root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears

they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving

Philosophers who were remodeling the world with words, and making

card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with unbelieving

Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this

wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of

the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time--and has ever

since--to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural

subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of

exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various

notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the Spies

among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur--forming a goodly half of

the polite company--would have found it hard to discover among the

angels of that sphere one solitary wife who in her manners and

appearance owned to being a mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of

bringing a troublesome creature into this world--which does not go far

towards the realization of the name of mother--there was no such thing

known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close,

and brought them up; and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and

supped as at twenty.

The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance

upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional

people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that

things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising way of

setting them right, half of the half-dozen had become members of a

fantastic sect of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within

themselves whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on

the spot--thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the

Future for Monseigneur's guidance. Besides these Dervishes were other

three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a

jargon about "the Centre of truth": holding that Man had got out of the

Centre of truth--which did not need much demonstration--but had not got

out of the Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying out of

the Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre, by

fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much

discoursing with spirits went on--and it did a world of good which never

became manifest.

But the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of

Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been

ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally

correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking-up of hair, such

delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant

swords to look at, and such delicate honor to the sense of smell, would

surely keep anything going for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen of

the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they

languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells;

and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and

fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and

his devouring hunger far away.

Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all

things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that was

never to leave off. From the Palace of the Tuileries, through

Monseigneur and the whole Court, through the Chambers, the Tribunals of

Justice, and all society (except the scarecrows), the Fancy Ball

descended to the Common Executioner; who in pursuance of the charm was

required to officiate "frizzled, powdered, in a gold-laced coat, pumps,

and white silk stockings." At the gallows and the wheel--the axe was a

rarity--Monsieur Paris,--as it was the episcopal mode among his brother

Professors of the provinces, Monsieur Orleans and the rest, to call

him,--presided in this dainty dress. And who among the company at

Monseigneur's reception in that seventeen-hundred-and-eightieth year of

our Lord could possibly doubt that a system rooted in a frizzled

hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk-stockinged, would

see the very stars out!

Monseigneur, having eased his four men of their burdens and taken his

chocolate, caused the doors of the Holiest of Holiests to be thrown

open, and issued forth. Then what submission, what cringing and fawning,

what servility, what abject humiliation! As to bowing down in body and

spirit, nothing in that way was left for Heaven--which may have been one

among other reasons why the worshipers of Monseigneur never troubled it.

Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there, a whisper on one

happy slave and a wave of the hand on another, Monseigneur affably

passed through his rooms to the remote region of the Circumference of

Truth. There Monseigneur turned and came back again, and so in due

course of time got himself shut up in his sanctuary by the chocolate

sprites, and was seen no more.

The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little storm,

and the precious little bells went ringing down-stairs. There was soon

but one person left of all the crowd, and he, with his hat under his arm

and his snuff-box in his hand, slowly passed among the mirrors on his

way out.

"I devote you," said this person, stopping at the last door on his way,

and turning in the direction of the sanctuary, "to the Devil!"

With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had shaken the

dust from his feet, and quietly walked down-stairs.

He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and

with a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every

feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose,

beautifully formed otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the top of

each nostril. In those two compressions, or dints, the only little

change that the face ever showed, resided. They persisted in changing

color sometimes, and they would be occasionally dilated and contracted

by something like a faint pulsation; then they gave a look of treachery

and cruelty to the whole countenance. Examined with attention, its

capacity of helping such a look was to be found in the line of the mouth

and the lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much too horizontal and

thin; still, in the effect the face made, it was a handsome face, and a

remarkable one.

Its owner went down-stairs into the courtyard, got into his carriage,

and drove away. Not many people had talked with him at the reception;

he had stood in a little space apart, and Monseigneur might have been

warmer in his manner. It appeared, under the circumstances, rather

agreeable to him to see the common people dispersed before his horses,

and often barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he

were charging an enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought

no check into the face or to the lips of the master. The complaint had

sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age, that

in the narrow streets without foot-ways, the fierce patrician custom of

hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a barbarous

manner. But few cared enough for that to think of it a second time, and

in this matter, as in all others, the common wretches were left to get

out of their difficulties as they could.

With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of

consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage

dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming

before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of

its way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its

wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a

number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.

But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have

stopped; carriages were often known to drive on and leave their wounded

behind; and why not? But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry,

and there were twenty hands at the horses' bridles.

"What has gone wrong?" said Monsieur, calmly looking out.

A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of

the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was

down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.

"Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!" said a ragged and submissive man, "it is

a child."

"Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?"

"Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis--it is a pity--yes."

The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was,

into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly

got up from the ground and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the

Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.

"Killed!" shrieked the man in wild desperation, extending both arms at

their length above his head, and staring at him. "Dead!"

The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was

nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness

and eagerness; there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the

people say anything; after the first cry they had been silent, and they

remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken was flat and

tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over

them all as if they had been mere rats come out of their holes.

He took out his purse.

"It is extraordinary to me," said he, "that you people cannot take care

of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever in

the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses? See! Give

him that."

He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads

craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The

tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, "Dead!"

He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest

made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder,

sobbing and crying and pointing to the fountain, where some women were

stooping over the motionless bundle and moving gently about it. They

were as silent, however, as the men.

"I know all, I know all," said the last comer. "Be a brave man, my

Gaspard! It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to

live. It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour

as happily?"

"You are a philosopher, you there," said the Marquis, smiling. "How do

they call you?"

"They call me Defarge."

"Of what trade?"

"Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine."

"Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine," said the Marquis,

throwing him another gold coin, "and spend it as you will. The horses

there; are they right?"

Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the

Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the

air of a gentleman who had accidentally broken some common thing, and

had paid for it and could afford to pay for it, when his ease was

suddenly disturbed by a coin flying into his carriage, and ringing on

its floor.

"Hold!" said Monsieur the Marquis. "Hold the horses! Who threw that?"

He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a

moment before; but the wretched father was groveling on his face on the

pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the

figure of a dark stout woman, knitting.

"You dogs!" said the Marquis, but smoothly and with an unchanged front,

except as to the spots on his nose: "I would ride over any of you very

willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal

threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he

should be crushed under the wheels."

So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of

what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not

a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men, not one.

But the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily, and looked the

Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his

contemptuous eyes passed over her and over all the other rats; and he

leaned back in his seat again and gave the word, "Go on!"

He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick

succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the

Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the

whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by. The rats

had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking on

for hours; soldiers and police often passing between them and the

spectacle, and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through

which they peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and

hidden himself away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle

while it lay on the base of the fountain sat there watching the running

of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball--when the one woman who

had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness

of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran

into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule,

time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together

in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all

things ran their course.

* * * * *

A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it but not abundant.

Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas

and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On

inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent

tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly--a dejected

disposition to give up and wither away.

Monsieur the Marquis in his traveling carriage (which might have been

lighter), conducted by four post-horses and two postilions, fagged up a

steep hill. A blush on the countenance of Monsieur the Marquis was no

impeachment of his high breeding; it was not from within; it was

occasioned by an external circumstance beyond his control--the setting

sun.

The sunset struck so brilliantly into the traveling carriage when it

gained the hill-top, that its occupant was steeped in crimson. "It will

die out," said Monsieur the Marquis, glancing at his hands, "directly."

In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped at the moment. When the

heavy drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the carriage slid down

hill, with a cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the red glow departed

quickly; the sun and the Marquis going down together, there was no glow

left when the drag was taken off.

But there remained a broken country, bold and open, a little village at

the bottom of the hill, a broad sweep and rise beyond it, a church

tower, a windmill, a forest for the chase, and a crag with a fortress on

it, used as a prison. Round upon all these darkening objects as the

night drew on, the Marquis looked, with the air of one who was coming

near home.

The village had its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor

tannery, poor tavern, poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses, poor

fountain, all usual poor appointments. It had its poor people too. All

its people were poor, and many of them were sitting at their doors,

shredding spare onions and the like for supper, while many were at the

fountain, washing leaves, and grasses, and any such small yieldings of

the earth that could be eaten. Expressive signs of what made them poor

were not wanting; the tax for the state, the tax for the church, the tax

for the lord, tax local and tax general, were to be paid here and to be

paid there, according to solemn inscription in the little village, until

the wonder was that there was any village left unswallowed.

Few children were to be seen, and no dogs. As to the men and women,

their choice on earth was stated in the prospect--Life on the lowest

terms that could sustain it, down in the little village under the mill;

or captivity and Death in the dominant prison on the crag.

Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his postilions'

whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening air, as

if he came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the Marquis drew up in his

traveling carriage at the posting-house gate. It was hard by the

fountain, and the peasants suspended their operations to look at him. He

looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the slow sure

filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the

meagreness of Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the

truth through the best part of a hundred years.

Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces that

drooped before him, as the like of himself had drooped before

Monseigneur of the Court--only the difference was, that these faces

drooped merely to suffer and not to propitiate--when a grizzled mender

of the roads joined the group.

"Bring me hither that fellow!" said the Marquis to the courier.

The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows closed round

to look and listen, in the manner of the people at the Paris fountain.

"I passed you on the road?"

"Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honor of being passed on the road."

"Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both?"

"Monseigneur, it is true."

"What did you look at so fixedly?"

"Monseigneur, I looked at the man."

He stooped a little, and with his tattered blue cap pointed under the

carriage. All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage.

"What man, pig? And why look there?"

"Pardon, Monseigneur; he swung by the chain of the shoe--the drag."

"Who?" demanded the traveler.

"Monseigneur, the man."

"May the Devil carry away these idiots! How do you call the man? You

know all the men of this part of the country. Who was he?"

"Your clemency, Monseigneur! He was not of this part of the country. Of

all the days of my life, I never saw him."

"Swinging by the chain? To be suffocated?"

"With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it, Monseigneur.

His head hanging over--like this!"

He turned himself sideways to the carriage, and leaned back, with his

face thrown up to the sky, and his head hanging down; then recovered

himself, fumbled with his cap, and made a bow.

"What was he like?"

"Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller. All covered with dust,

white as a spectre, tall as a spectre!"

The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd; but all

eyes, without comparing notes with other eyes, looked at Monsieur the

Marquis. Perhaps to observe whether he had any spectre on his

conscience.

"Truly, you did well," said the Marquis, felicitously sensible that such

vermin were not to ruffle him, "to see a thief accompanying my carriage,

and not open that great mouth of yours. Bah! Put him aside, Monsieur

Gabelle!"

Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster and some other taxing functionary,

united; he had come out with great obsequiousness to assist at this

examination, and had held the examined by the drapery of his arm in an

official manner.

"Bah! Go aside!" said Monsieur Gabelle.

"Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village

to-night, and be sure that his business is honest, Gabelle."

"Monseigneur, I am flattered to devote myself to your orders."

"Did he run away, fellow?--where is that Accursed?"

The accursed was already under the carriage with some half-dozen

particular friends, pointing out the chain with his blue cap. Some

half-dozen other particular friends promptly haled him out, and

presented him breathless to Monsieur the Marquis.

"Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped for the drag?"

"Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over the hillside, head first, as

a person plunges into the river."

"See to it, Gabelle. Go on!"

The half-dozen who were peering at the chain were still among the

wheels, like sheep; the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky

to save their skins and bones; they had very little else to save, or

they might not have been so fortunate.

The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and up the

rise beyond was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually it

subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many

sweet scents of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer

gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the

points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the

courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dim distance.

At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground, with

a Cross and a new large figure of our Saviour on it; it was a poor

figure in wood, done by some inexperienced rustic carver, but he had

studied the figure from the life--his own life, maybe--for it was

dreadfully spare and thin.

To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been

growing worse and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She turned

her head as the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and presented

herself at the carriage door.

"It is you, Monseigneur! Monseigneur, a petition."

With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face,

Monseigneur looked out.

"How, then! What is it? Always petitions!"

"Monseigneur. For the love of the great God! My husband, the forester."

"What of your husband, the forester? Always the same with you people. He

cannot pay something?"

"He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead."

"Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?"

"Alas, no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor

grass."

"Well?"

"Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass!"

"Again, well?"

She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of passionate

grief; by turns she clasped her veinous and knotted hands together with

wild energy, and laid one of them on the carriage door--tenderly,

caressingly, as if it had been a human breast, and could be expected to

feel the appealing touch.

"Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my petition! My husband died of

want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want."

"Again, well? Can I feed them?"

"Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don't ask it. My petition is,

that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband's name, may be placed

over him to show where he lies. Otherwise the place will be quickly

forgotten; it will never be found when I am dead of the same malady; I

shall be laid under some other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they are

so many, they increase so fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur!

Monseigneur!"

The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had broken into a

brisk trot, the postilions had quickened the pace; she was left far

behind, and Monseigneur, again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly

diminishing the league or two of distance that remained between him and

his chateau.

The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as

the rain falls, impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group

at the fountain not far away; to whom the mender of roads, with the aid

of the blue cap without which he was nothing, still enlarged upon his

man like a spectre as long as they could bear it. By degrees, as they

could bear no more, they dropped off one by one, and lights twinkled in

little casements; which lights, as the casements darkened, and more

stars came out, seemed to have shot up into the sky instead of having

been extinguished.

The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many overhanging trees,

was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time; and the shadow was exchanged

for the light of a flambeau, as his carriage stopped, and the great door

of his chateau was opened to him.

"Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived from England?"

"Monseigneur, not yet."

THE GORGON'S HEAD

It was a heavy mass of building, that chateau of Monsieur the Marquis,

with a large stone courtyard before it, and two stone sweeps of

staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony

business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and

stone flowers, and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in all

directions. As if the Gorgon's head had surveyed it when it was finished

two centuries ago.

Up the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur the Marquis,

flambeau-preceded, went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing the

darkness to elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof of the

great pile of stable-building away among the trees. All else was so

quiet that the flambeau carried up the steps, and the other flambeau

held at the great door, burnt as if they were in a close room of state,

instead of being in the open night air. Other sound than the owl's voice

there was none, save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for

it was one of those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour

together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.

The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis crossed a

hall grim with certain old boar-spears, swords, and knives of the chase;

grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips, of which many a

peasant, gone to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord

was angry.

Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for the night,

Monsieur the Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going on before, went up

the staircase to a door in a corridor. This thrown open admitted him to

his own private apartment of three rooms; his bedchamber and two others.

High vaulted rooms with cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs upon the

hearths for the burning of wood in winter-time, and all luxuries

befitting the state of a marquis in a luxurious age and country. The

fashion of the last Louis but one, of the line that was never to

break--the fourteenth Louis--was conspicuous in their rich furniture;

but it was diversified by many objects that were illustrations of old

pages in the history of France.

A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms; a round

room, in one of the chateau's four extinguisher-topped towers. A small

lofty room, with its window wide open, and the wooden jalousie-blinds

closed, so that the dark night only showed in slight horizontal lines of

black, alternating with their broad lines of stone-color.

"My nephew," said the Marquis, glancing at the supper preparation; "they

said he was not arrived."

Nor was he; but he had been expected with Monseigneur.

"Ah! It is not probable he will arrive to-night; nevertheless, leave the

table as it is. I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour."

In a quarter of an hour Monseigneur was ready, and sat down alone to his

sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite to the window, and

he had taken his soup and was raising his glass of Bordeaux to his lips,

when he put it down.

"What is that?" he calmly asked, looking with attention at the

horizontal lines of black and stone-color.

"Monseigneur? That?"

"Outside the blinds. Open the blinds."

It was done.

"Well?"

"Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that are

here."

The servant who spoke had thrown the blinds wide, had looked out into

the vacant darkness, and stood, with that blank behind him, looking

round for instructions.

"Good," said the imperturbable master. "Close them again."

That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. He was

half-way through it, when he again stopped with his glass in his hand,

hearing the sound of wheels. It came on briskly, and came up to the

front of the chateau.

"Ask who is arrived."

It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few leagues behind

Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had diminished the distance

rapidly, but not so rapidly as to come up with Monseigneur on the road.

He had heard of Monseigneur, at the posting-houses, as being before him.

He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him then and

there, and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little while he came.

He had been known in England as Charles Darnay.

Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did not shake

hands.

"You left Paris yesterday, sir?" he said to Monseigneur, as he took his

seat at table.

"Yesterday. And you?"

"I come direct."

"From London?"

"Yes."

"You have been a long time coming," said the Marquis, with a smile.

"On the contrary; I come direct."

"Pardon me! I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time

intending the journey."

"I have been detained by"--the nephew stopped a moment in his

answer--"various business."

"Without doubt," said the polished uncle.

So long as a servant was present, no other words passed between them.

When coffee had been served and they were alone together, the nephew,

looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of the face that was like a

fine mask, opened a conversation.

"I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object that took

me away. It carried me into great and unexpected peril; but it is a

sacred object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have

sustained me."

"Not to death," said the uncle; "it is not necessary to say, to death."

"I doubt, sir," returned the nephew, "whether, if it had carried me to

the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there."

The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine straight

lines in the cruel face, looked ominous as to that; the uncle made a

graceful gesture of protest, which was so clearly a slight form of good

breeding that it was not reassuring.

"Indeed, sir," pursued the nephew, "for anything I know, you may have

expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious

circumstances that surrounded me."

"No, no, no," said the uncle pleasantly.

"But, however that may be," resumed the nephew, glancing at him with

deep distrust, "I know that your diplomacy would stop me by any means,

and would know no scruple as to means."

"My friend, I told you so," said the uncle, with a fine pulsation in the

two marks. "Do me the favor to recall that I told you so, long ago."

"I recall it."

"Thank you," said the Marquis--very sweetly indeed.

His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical

instrument.

"In effect, sir," pursued the nephew, "I believe it to be at once your

bad fortune, and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a prison in

France here."

"I do not quite understand," returned the uncle, sipping his coffee.

"Dare I ask you to explain?"

"I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the court, and had not

been overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a _lettre de cachet_

would have sent me to some fortress indefinitely."

"It is possible," said the uncle, with great calmness. "For the honor of

the family, I could even resolve to incommode you to that extent. Pray

excuse me!"

"I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before

yesterday was, as usual, a cold one," observed the nephew.

"I would not say happily, my friend," returned the uncle, with refined

politeness; "I would not be sure of that. A good opportunity for

consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, might influence

your destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for

yourself. But it is useless to discuss the question. I am, as you say,

at a disadvantage. These little instruments of correction, these gentle

aids to the power and honor of families, these slight favors that might

so incommode you, are only to be obtained now by interest and

importunity. They are sought by so many, and they are granted

(comparatively) to so few! It used not to be so, but France in all such

things is changed for the worse. Our not remote ancestors held the right

of life and death over the surrounding vulgar. From this room, many such

dogs have been taken out to be hanged; in the next room (my bedroom),

one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing

some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter--_his_ daughter! We have

lost many privileges; a new philosophy has become the mode; and the

assertion of our station, in these days, might (I do not go so far as to

say would, but might) cause us real inconvenience. All very bad, very

bad!"

The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff and shook his head; as

elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be, of a country still

containing himself, that great means of regeneration.

"We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in the modern

time also," said the nephew, gloomily, "that I believe our name to be

more detested than any name in France."

"Let us hope so," said the uncle. "Detestation of the high is the

involuntary homage of the low."

"There is not," pursued the nephew, in his former tone, "a face I can

look at, in all this country round about us, which looks at me with any

deference on it but the dark deference of fear and slavery."

"A compliment," said the Marquis, "to the grandeur of the family,

merited by the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur.

Hah!" And he took another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly

crossed his legs.

But when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered his eyes

thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask looked at him

sideways with a stronger concentration of keenness, closeness, and

dislike than was comportable with its wearer's assumption of

indifference.

"Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear

and slavery, my friend," observed the Marquis, "will keep the dogs

obedient to the whip, as long as this roof," looking up to it, "shuts

out the sky."

That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the

chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as

they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him

that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the

ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked ruins. As for the roof he

vaunted, he might have found _that_ shutting out the sky in a new

way--to wit, forever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead

was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred thousand muskets.

"Meanwhile," said the Marquis, "I will preserve the honor and repose of

the family, if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall we

terminate our conference for the night?"

"A moment more."

"An hour if you please."

"Sir," said the nephew, "we have done wrong, and are reaping the fruits

of wrong."

"_We_ have done wrong?" repeated the Marquis, with an inquiring smile,

and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.

"Our family; our honorable family, whose honor is of so much account to

both of us, in such different ways. Even in my father's time we did a

world of wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and

our pleasure, whatever it was. Why need I speak of my father's time,

when it is equally yours? Can I separate my father's twin brother, joint

inheritor, and next successor, from himself?"

"Death has done that!" said the Marquis.

"And has left me," answered the nephew, "bound to a system that is

frightful to me, responsible for it but powerless in it; seeking to

execute the last request of my dear mother's lips, and obey the last

look of my dear mother's eyes, which implored me to have mercy and to

redress; and tortured by seeking assistance and power in vain."

"Seeking them from me, my nephew," said the Marquis, touching him on the

breast with his forefinger,--they were now standing by the hearth,--"you

will forever seek them in vain, be assured."

Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face was cruelly,

craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking quietly at his

nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he touched him on the

breast, as though his finger were the fine point of a small sword, with

which in delicate finesse he ran him through the body, and said, "My

friend, I will die perpetuating the system under which I have lived."

When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and put his

box in his pocket.

"Better to be a rational creature," he added then, after ringing a small

bell on the table, "and accept your natural destiny. But you are lost,

Monsieur Charles, I see."

"This property and France are lost to me," said the nephew, sadly; "I

renounce them."

"Are they both yours to renounce? France may be, but is the property? It

is scarcely worth mentioning; but is it, yet?"

"I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it passed

to me from you to-morrow--"

"Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable."

"--or twenty years hence--"

"You do me too much honor," said the Marquis; "still, I prefer that

supposition."

"--I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is little to

relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin!"

"Hah!" said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room.

"To the eye it is fair enough here; but seen in its integrity, under the

sky and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste,

mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness,

and suffering."

"Hah!" said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.

"If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better

qualified to free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the

weight that drags it down, so that the miserable people who cannot leave

it, and who have been long wrung to the last point of endurance, may in

another generation suffer less; but it is not for me. There is a curse

on it, and on all this land."

"And you?" said the uncle. "Forgive my curiosity; do you, under your new

philosophy, graciously intend to live?"

"I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with nobility at

their backs, may have to do some day--work."

"In England, for example?"

"Yes. The family honor, sir, is safe for me in this country. The family

name can suffer from me in no other, for I bear it in no other."

The ringing of the bell had caused the adjoining bedchamber to be

lighted. It now shone brightly through the door of communication. The

Marquis looked that way, and listened for the retreating step of his

valet.

"England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you have

prospered there," he observed then, turning his calm face to his nephew

with a smile.

"I have already said that for my prospering there, I am sensible I may

be indebted to you, sir. For the rest, it is my Refuge."

"They say, those boastful English, that it is the Refuge of many. You

know a compatriot who has found a Refuge there? A Doctor?"

"Yes."

"With a daughter?"

"Yes."

"Yes," said the Marquis. "You are fatigued. Good-night!"

As he bent his head in his most courtly manner, there was a secrecy in

his smiling face, and he conveyed an air of mystery to those words,

which struck the eyes and ears of his nephew forcibly. At the same time,

the thin straight lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin

straight lips, and the markings in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that

looked handsomely diabolic.

"Yes," repeated the Marquis. "A Doctor with a daughter. Yes. So

commences the new philosophy! You are fatigued. Good-night!"

It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone fence

outside the chateau as to interrogate that face of his. The nephew

looked at him in vain, in passing on to the door.

"Good-night!" said the uncle, "I look to the pleasure of seeing you

again in the morning. Good repose! Light Monsieur my nephew to his

chamber, there!--And burn Monsieur my nephew in his bed, if you will,"

he added to himself, before he rang his little bell again, and summoned

his valet to his own bedroom.

The valet come and gone, Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his

loose chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still

night. Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered feet making no

noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger;--looked like some

enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose

periodical change into tiger form was either just going off or just

coming on.

He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bedroom, looking again at the

scraps of the day's journey that came unbidden into his mind; the slow

toil up the hill at sunset, the setting sun, the descent, the mill, the

prison on the crag, the little village in the hollow, the peasants at

the fountain, and the mender of roads with his blue cap pointing out the

chain under the carriage. That fountain suggested the Paris fountain,

the little bundle lying on the step, the women bending over it, and the

tall man with his arms up, crying, "Dead!"

"I am cool now," said Monsieur the Marquis, "and may go to bed."

So, leaving only one light burning on the large hearth, he let his thin

gauze curtains fall around him, and heard the night break its silence

with a long sigh as he composed himself to sleep.

The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night for

three heavy hours; for three heavy hours the horses in the stables

rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with

very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to

the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures

hardly ever to say what is set down for them.

For three heavy hours the stone faces of the chateau, lion and human,

stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the landscape,

dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads.

The burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass

were undistinguishable from one another; the figure on the Cross might

have come down, for anything that could be seen of it. In the village,

taxers and taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming perhaps of banquets, as the

starved usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and the

yoked ox may, its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and

freed.

The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the fountain

at the chateau dropped unseen and unheard--both melting away, like the

minutes that were falling from the spring of Time--through three dark

hours. Then the gray water of both began to be ghostly in the light, and

the eyes of the stone faces of the chateau were opened.

Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the still

trees, and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow, the water of

the chateau fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces

crimsoned. The carol of the birds was loud and high, and on the

weather-beaten sill of the great window of the bedchamber of Monsieur

the Marquis, one little bird sang its sweetest song with all its might.

At this, the nearest stone face seemed to stare amazed, and with open

mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked awe-stricken.

Now the sun was full up, and movement began in the village. Casement

windows opened, crazy doors were unbarred, and people came forth

shivering--chilled, as yet, by the new sweet air. Then began the rarely

lightened toil of the day among the village population. Some to the

fountain; some to the fields; men and women here to dig and delve; men

and women there to see to the poor live stock, and lead the bony cows

out to such pasture as could be found by the roadside. In the church and

at the Cross a kneeling figure or two; attendant on the latter prayers,

the led cow, trying for a breakfast among the weeds at its foot.

The chateau awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke gradually and

surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knives of the chase had been

reddened as of old; then had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine;

now doors and windows were thrown open, horses in their stables looked

round over their shoulders at the light and freshness pouring in at

doorways, leaves sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, dogs

pulled hard at their chains and reared, impatient to be loosed.

All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life and the

return of morning. Surely not so the ringing of the great bell of the

chateau, nor the running up and down the stairs, nor the hurried figures

on the terrace, nor the booting and tramping here and there and

everywhere, nor the quick saddling of horses and riding away?

What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, already

at work on the hill-top beyond the village, with his day's dinner (not

much to carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth no crow's while to

peck at, on a heap of stones? Had the birds, carrying some grains of it

to a distance, dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds? Whether or

no, the mender of roads ran, on the sultry morning, as if for his life,

down the hill, knee-high in dust, and never stopped till he got to the

fountain.

All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about in

their depressed manner, and whispering low, but showing no other

emotions than grim curiosity and surprise. The led cows, hastily brought

in and tethered to anything that would hold them, were looking stupidly

on, or lying down chewing the cud of nothing particularly repaying their

trouble, which they had picked up in their interrupted saunter. Some of

the people of the chateau, and some of those of the posting-house, and

all the taxing authorities, were armed more or less, and were crowded on

the other side of the little street in a purposeless way that was highly

fraught with nothing. Already the mender of roads had penetrated into

the midst of a group of fifty particular friends, and was smiting

himself in the breast with his blue cap. What did all this portend, and

what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind a

servant on horse-back, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle

(double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of

the German ballad of Leonora?

It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the chateau.

The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added

the one stone face wanting; the stone face for which it had waited

through about two hundred years.

It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine

mask, suddenly started, made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the

heart of the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt

was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled:--

"_Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from_ JACQUES."

THE IVY GREEN

Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy Green,

That creepeth o'er ruins old!

Of right choice food are his meals, I ween,

In his cell so lone and cold.

The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed,

To pleasure his dainty whim:

And the moldering dust that years have made

Is a merry meal for him.

Creeping where no life is seen,

A rare old plant is the Ivy Green.

Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings,

And a stanch old heart has he.

How closely he twineth, how tight he clings,

To his friend the huge Oak-Tree!

And slyly he traileth along the ground,

And his leaves he gently waves,

As he joyously hugs and crawleth round

The rich mold of dead men's graves.

Creeping where grim death has been,

A rare old plant is the Ivy Green.

Whole ages have fled and their works decayed,

And nations have scattered been;

But the stout old Ivy shall never fade,

From its hale and hearty green.

The brave old plant in its lonely days

Shall fatten upon the past:

For the stateliest building man can raise

Is the Ivy's food at last.

Creeping on, where time has been,

A rare old plant is the Ivy Green.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the 'Paradiso' (canto xv.) he introduces his

great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, who tells of himself that he

followed the Emperor Conrad to fight against the Mohammedans, was made a

knight by him, and was slain in the war.

[2] From the letter already referred to, cited by Lionardo Bruni.

[3] Charles II. of Naples was the cousin of Philip III., the Bold, of

France, the father of Charles of Valois; and in 1290 Charles of Valois

had married his daughter.

[4] These decrees and the other public documents relating to Dante are

to be found in various publications. They have all been collected and

edited by Professor George R. Carpenter, in the tenth and eleventh

Annual Reports of the Dante Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1891,

1892.

[5] This decree was pronounced in a General Council of the Commune by

the Vicar of King Robert of Naples, into whose hands the Florentines had

given themselves in 1313 for a term of five years,--extended afterwards

to eight,--with the hope that by his authority order might be preserved

within the city.

[6] Among the letters ascribed to Dante is one, much noted, in reply to

a letter from a friend in Florence, in regard to terms of absolution on

which he might secure his re-admission to Florence. It is of very

doubtful authenticity. It has no external evidence to support it, and

the internal evidence of its rhetorical form and sentimental tone is all

against it. It belongs in the same class with the famous letter of Fra

Ilario, and like that, seems not unlikely to have been an invention of

Boccaccio's.

[7] _Literally_, "who by the sweetness of its glory put exile behind our

back."

[8] The sun,--a planet according to the Ptolemaic astronomy.

[9] It was a common belief that the spring was the season of the

creation.

[10] These three beasts typify the division of sins into those of

incontinence, of violence, and of fraud.

[11] Who he was and What should result.

[12] In Limbo, neither in hell nor in heaven.

[13] The heaven of the Moon, the nearest to Earth of the nine concentric

Heavens.

[14] The type of illuminating grace.

[15] It was Galahaut who, in the Romance, prevailed on Guinevere to give

a kiss to Lancelot.

[16] When it is sunrise at Jerusalem it is midnight in Spain, midday at

the Ganges, and sunset in Purgatory.

[17] To be buried alive.

[18] Leah and Rachel are respectively the types of the virtuous active

and contemplative life.

[19] As they come nearer home.

[20] In the preceding canto a mystic procession, symbolizing the Old and

New Dispensation, has appeared in the Earthly Paradise. At its head were

seven candlesticks, symbols of the sevenfold spirit of the Lord; it was

followed by personages representing the truthful books of the Old

Testament, and these by the chariot of the Church drawn by a griffon,

who in his double form, half eagle and half lion, represented Christ in

his double nature, human and divine.

[21] The lower septentrion, the seven stars of the Great Bear.

[22] Words from the AEneid (vi. 884), sung by the angels.

[23] The olive is the symbol of wisdom and of peace; the three colors

are those of Faith, Charity and Hope.

[24] Words from the AEneid, iv. 23.

[25] All the joy and beauty of Paradise which Eve lost, and which were

now surrounding Dante.

[26] When he had entered Purgatory.

[27] The words are from Psalm xxxi., verses 1 to 8.

[28] If the wind blow from Africa.

[29] Both devout and piteous.

[30] Through the influences of the circling heavens.

[31] From divine grace.

[32] In Hell.

[33] Not yet obliterated by the waters of Lethe.

[34] Inspired by me.

[35] Other objects of desire.

[36] Numidia, of which Iarbas was king.

[37] The beard being the sign of manhood, which should be accompanied by

wisdom.

[38] The one which by its attractions most diverted me from Beatrice.

[39] A solitary lady whom he had met on first entering the Earthly

Paradise, and who had accompanied him thus far.

[40] The first words of the 7th verse of the 51st Psalm: "Purge me with

hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."

[41] The four cardinal virtues.

[42] The three evangelic virtues.

[43] Now with the divine, now with the human.

[44] Light in its essence; all other light is derived from it.

[45] This union of substance and accident.

[46] So overwhelming was the vision that the memory could not retain it

completely even for an instant.

[47] The wish to see the mystery of the union of the two natures, the

divine and human in Christ.

[48] That Love which makes sun and stars revolve was giving a concordant

revolution to my desire and my will.

[49] The middle aisle of St. Paul's in London was the fashionable walk.